Too Much Customization

Many people who know me already know that I have a thing against Capcom's Vs. series. Personally, the reason I see for them selling well is simply that people love crossovers, then the high-execution pros love the skill it takes to get the best combos involved. This is actually a good strategy in terms of sales, satisfying the core and the casual audience simultaneously. However, these games universally go too far and thus make what I consider to be flaws in their game design. Although my primary issue is the infinite combos they all have, my issue today has more to do with the level of customization they all have.
I'll start with a game I recently purchased on PS2 (after owning a GC version for a many years): Capcom Vs. SNK 2. I may be off on my count, but I think there's about 48 characters in the game. There's a problem already: too many characters means some of them are going to be left in the dust of uselessness. Their method of fixing it actually brings with it a more destructive issue, and that method is several choices of play style. You get 6 "grooves" to use, 8 if you count the option to generate 2 custom grooves of your own. They are each actually very interesting in terms of game design, each of them carrying enough unique things that none of them are useless. The problem though, is that this results in effectively 288 characters (48 x 6). If you thought all those Ryu clones was bad... Anyway, it goes further than that. Aside from the standard 1-on-1 play (and I'm very glad Capcom allowed that option, since it seems absent from newer Vs. games), you have 3-on-3 or Ratio matches. Ratio gives you 4 power points to assign to 1, 2, or 3 characters, an option I have seen in very few other games (thank you to Bandai's Dragon Ball card game).
At this point of writing the article, I had to do a little mathematical research to make my point. It involves permutations, a term I just now learned. A lot of it was going over my head, but if I did everything correctly, that makes a total of 17296 potential combinations, just in a 3-on-3 setting! Figure in Ratio match, which can have teams of 3, 2, or 1. You get that set of 17296, the 2-character teams totalling 1128, and of course 1-character teams which is obviously 48 for a total of 18,472. That's just the number of characters, but then you have to figure in the ratios assigned. 1-character has no deviation, as it's always all 4 points. Each 2-character team has 3 possibilities: 3-1, 2-2, or 1-3, so that means there's 1128 x 3 combinations for that, or 3384. There will be 3 potential combinations in a 3-character team: 2-1-1, 1-2-1, or 1-1-2. That means we get 17296 x 3 = 51888. 51888 + 3384 + 48 = 55320. By the way, don't forget that it all gets topped off with whatever groove you chose (we've so far gone over 48 characters and 4 ratio points over 1, 2, or 3 characters per team). 55320 x 6 = 331920. This had to be applied here because the groove choice will cover the entire team (and addition was involved, so order of operations did matter). The number would be even more astronomical if you could choose 1 groove per character.
Here's the good news. With 325152 potential teams within Ratio match, that means the game is very customizable to one player's particular strategy. The bad news: in practice, most of those combinations are completely useless. Mathematics is all about theory, and practice destroys many calculations that might result from it. The true irony is that what really comes up in realistic teams is much closer to our original number: 48. I haven't actually checked on it, but I think that's being fairly liberal. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual result is less than 20, and only 5-10 of them being consistently tournament-winning. Contrast that with Super Street Fighter 4, which has very little customization. Even including Dan, everybody has the capability to be viable given the proper player, making 36 realistic characters without all the creative team-juggling CvSNK2 has. I'll admit, it's fun to figure out the possibilities of different characters. I'd personally just rather put my focus more on the character-specific matchups, which you'll have to do anyway.
Now for something that I can more realistically research: Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. I hate this one most passionately because this is a textbook example of what happens when patches can't occur. There are infinite combos everywhere and the tremendously huge cast of characters is impossible to balance effectively, making many characters relatively worthless. Out of 56 characters, there are only 4 real stars that would be all anyone plays if it was 1-on-1. Eventhubs.com lists 25 popular teams, but I don't have to go into any further math to tell you that 25 is rather bupkiss when you consider 56 characters, 3 assist options per characters, and 3-on-3 tag play.
Now tag team... that is the true customization enemy I have. I won't go into a lot of detail as I want to wrap this up. Suffice it to say I hate infinite combos, and the ability to quickly switch into a different character on the fly makes that possible. It should not require a consistent world champion & professional player to combat something as powerful as tag play.